Monthly Archives: November 2009

Ari Fleischer Communications, a sports public relations firm headed by the former press secretary for President George W. Bush, has been hired by BCS officials to help remodel the tattered image of college football’s postseason system.

I can’t wait to see what softballs Jeff Gannon tosses as questions during the pressers.

Goldbugs have long-believed that central banks try to manipulate the price of gold, i.e. dumping gold onto the market at certain times to keep the price down, then slowly re-acquiring it after the spike passes, etc. But in an era where the goldbugs are predicting $2000/oz and higher (I’ve seen predictions of $5000/oz), I don’t think the central banks have enough gold in their vaults to blunt that rise — and even worse, if they made a concerted effort to dump it, that very signal would push prices through the roof. Even worse, it’s a prisoner’s dilemma. The central banks are helped if they all dump the gold, but if one goes rogue and starts buying it all up, it ruins the plan for all of them.

So no, the central banks can’t just dump their gold onto the market. Yet they have serious fears that the public senses the inflationary forces in the world and are looking for a hedge. And they REALLY don’t want the gold price to spike and fuel those fears.

The initial discovery was something like four gold bars, which the Hong Kong bankers drilled invasively to test the contents. Reminds me of drilling the earth and measuring how many grams of gold per tonne. The HK bankers hoped to have 99% gold yield in their drill program for the resident bars. They found something like 1% instead and 99% tungsten. By the way, tungsten sells for less than $70 per ton, which makes its swaps for gold to be 60x more profitable than silver bar swaps. Another handy usage for the Gold/Silver ratio in calculations. The hunt was on. Now not a single assayer on the planet is available, as all are tied up. They have been commissioned to test the gold bars shipped from the United States of Fraudulent Banker America in their own bullion vaults. They use basic methods of four drill holes with direct assay of shavings, but also less invasive methods like electro-magnetic waves to examine the metal lattice structure. When highest level methods are needed, they turn to mass spectrometry. NOW ALMOST NO GOLD BARS WILL LEAVE THE LONDON OR NEW YORK METALS EXCHANGES WITHOUT SOME AUTHENTICATION, AS DISTRUST IS WIDESPREAD.

Think, for a second, what a diabolical scheme this would be, if perpetrated by central banks.

In a move they can blame on simple counterfeiters (trying to pass off the tungsten as if it were gold at a huge profit), they can paralyze the entire gold market in a fear that if you buy gold, it won’t be real. They can try to destroy demand for gold in such a way that — if undiscovered — would never be traced to them. All this while keeping all their gold safely in their vaults and devaluing their fiat currencies.

Now, I’m not going to up and claim that such a scheme is being perpetrated. But would you put it past the central bankers, a group of people desperate to keep faith in their own fiat currencies — since faith is the only thing that backs them?

A few notes: Shetty runs a for-profit business, not a charity. He makes money at these prices. And although a big part of his lower prices has to do with the generally low cost of living in India, his mass-production techniques have reduced prices more than 50% even compared to other Indian hospitals.

But although this may be cheap medicine, there’s nothing cheap about his results: outcomes at his hospitals are at least as good as they are at the best American clinics, and probably even better. It’s the kind of thing someone ought to be trying here. The whole story is worth a read.

Well, Kevin, if we had a true free market for healthcare in the US, someone could try it. But it apparently hasn’t happened. So I’d ask a few simple questions:

If the problem with our healthcare, as you define it, is the insurance industry, why do you think it hasn’t been tried yet (as a way for them to lower costs)? As an advocate for single-payer, do you think it any more likely to be tried once the government takes over?

Somewhere during the summer/fall of 2005, Eric started kicking around an idea with some of us on the old Life, Liberty, Property blog community. Many of us at our own personal blogs had risen to the level of Marauding Marsupial in Truth Laid Bear’s old tracking system, but Eric thought we could be a more effective force for liberty by pooling our resources. He started building The Liberty Papers, and invited a few of us (of the current contributors, that includes Chris, Doug, Kevin, Quincy and myself) to join his little experiment.

Well, today marks four years since the site began, and it’s been quite a ride since then. Some contributors have moved on, due to life intruding on blogging. We’ve expanded our rolls to replace them and try to expand our ideological coverage as well. And Eric, our founder, was put into the choice of taking a new job that would be wonderful for his family and career, but would mean he had to stop blogging. He turned the reins of the site over to me, and I’ve tried not to muck it up too badly.

In four years, we’ve written over 3500 posts, received over 31,000 comments, and we’re well on our way to 1.5M unique visits. We’ve had our successes, with Stephen Gordon breaking the DHS “domestic terrorist” report, attracting attention from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

All in all, I think we fit into a very nice space in the libertarian blogosphere. We hail from a wide range of disciplines, with nearly none of us in a position to call “political operative” an occupation rather than a hobby. We hail from such diverse fields as technology, law, and even music. We all share, though, a common fight — for the increase of liberty.

We’ve come a long way in four years, and I’m proud of the contributors who work to make this site great and thankful for all our readers who regularly comment here and make The Liberty Papers more than a broadsheet, but a conversation. I’m very happy with what this site has become — but I’m not sure I’m satisfied. My hope is that one year from today, we can mark our fifth year as a site bigger, stronger, and more active than its ever been.

“Certainly we disagree,” said District Attorney Hal Kittrell, adding that the attorney general’s office will seek a rehearing on the matter and will appeal, if necessary, to the state Supreme Court.

If the courts all agree that a new trial is necessary, there will be another trial because prosecutors believe Maye is guilty, he said. “We didn’t buy it (his self-defense claim), nor did a jury, so we’ll go back.”